The problem with electric cars is that they're still cars. Cars are inherently way less efficient than trains, or even buses. In practice, trains take less than 1/7th the power that cars do to transport passengers - and that's before we get into the land-subsidies (parking, giant roads) that cars need in order to be financially competitive.

But even when cars are necessary, they tend to be massively overengineered - does every car need to be 1) a five-seater, 2) 500KM range (300mile range), and 3) capable of driving at 110KM/hr (70miles/hr)?

Every one of those requirements basically doubles the cost and halves the efficiency.

>First came the long tail pipe argument, I think even the most ardent of naysayers have realised that that one is bullshit.

I wish. Obviously it is bullshit, but it's a goddamn zombie argument that just won't die.

Here in the UK (and I believe most of Europe), they’re planning to ban sales of new ICE cars in I believe 2030. As such, 100% uptake (or close enough, perhaps there will some exceptions for specialised use cases) is almost guaranteed.

Traditional powerplants are big nation-scale projects measured in decades and cannot be moved mid-lifecycle - unlike solar panels. They are also strictly dependent on running water for cooling. In my country (Poland) there has been a week few years back where some powerplants had to shut down because nearby rivers were too low and the water temperature was too high to cool down the powerplants (you cannot heat the water to 60 C cause the river life will die, so the workable temperatures are surprisingly low).

If you care about mobility and adjusting to climate change - you should bet on solar more than on anything else.

There are problems with renewables, but there are also many solutions, and the criticism usually assumes we change nothing else in our energy grid.

For example it's true that renewables are less predictable than traditional powerplants. Which increases costs of energy because we need to keep some overcapacity in production, consumption and transfer capabilities for balancing purposes and that's expansive.

But - grid-scale batteries solve a lot of these problems, and they aren't just a cost - they are earning money even in traditional grids by outcompeting peak powerplants without any subsidies. In fact people are afraid of how fast they are "destroying the market" for peaker plants and there are propositions to regulate this against the grid-scale batteries :) Batteries do the equivalent of high frequency trading on energy market and peaker plants have like 15 minutes latency vs batteries sub-second latency - you can imagine how it works out in practice. The Tesla battery in Australia already paid off the investment costs.

Another way is to produce synthethic fuel with cheap solar power when it's not used and then run the generators on that. Basically make methane tanks our batteries. There are promising technologies doing that, for example Terraform Industries.

Supposedly they can produce natural gas that is cheaper than the peak prices EU paid at the start of the russian invasion of Ukraine.

Another way is to simply build a lot more and to use smart pricing to encourage people to use the energy during the peak production. For most people it's perfectly fine to charge their cars at parkings near their office, it's just an organizational problem. Heating houses in the winter can also be done during the day - most houses in Central Europe can stay comfortably hot for longer than a day during the winter.

There are a lot of things we could do, but people who don't want anything to change take 1 thing they don't like and assume everything else stays the same so that the change seem impossible.

It was about cobalt before, now that batteries switched to LFP without cobalt the naysayers switched to complaining about lack of lithium :)

I'll note that neodymium is, and is used in very small amounts (much less even than lithium) in most EV electric motors (specifically, the reluctance types that are currently most popular). It's not essential, but it does increase range by a few percent.

Neodymium is also one of the most abundant REEs- there are basically two groups of REEs, some of which are rare and some of which are >10x more abundant. Neodymium is in the latter. It's also not that supply is restricted (eg, how it all comes from china)- the demand is so low that the cost means it is not mined even where it is easy to harvest. There are large mines in the US and elsewhere that are shut down because China just does it cheaper.

Burning fuel at a single power station that is reasonably distant from populated areas is far better from a health perspective than tens of thousands of small, poorly-regulated engines burning fuel within 10 yards of people's homes. I would take electric over ICE even if it were 1-to-1 on fuel consumption, just to feel like I can safely breath outside again.

One correction - a typical coal burning power plant is approximately 33% efficient at converting fuel to energy [https://www.energy.gov/fecm/transformative-power-systems], and combined cycled natural gas power plants are 45-57% efficient. [https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/natural-gas...]

Direct ICE vehicles are between 11-27% efficient. [https://sciendo.com/pdf/10.2478/rtuect-2020-0041]

So even a inefficient coal plant is about 50% more efficient than a very efficient normal ICE car, and combined cycle natural gas IS 2x more efficient than a very efficient normal ICE car - and about 5x more efficient than a non-efficient ICE car.

Lots of cross comparisons can be made, but on overage, even with transmission losses, charging losses, etc. it would be very unusual for an EV + power plant combo to be less efficient end to end than directly fueling a traditional ICE vehicle. If it was, it would likely just be a few percent.

CapEx is a real concern here of course, and logistics.

But opex and energy efficiency are solidly in the EV camp.

> So do hybrids

No they don't. All the energy in a hybrid comes from an internal combustion engine which is generally less than 40%. Hybrids help by running the the ICE only when it would be efficient to do so but they can't help in constant speed highway driving.

> Burning fuel at power station isn't 2x as efficient as burning it in ICE engine

ICE engines are under 30% efficient (not counting the losses to accelerating/breaking and standing on idle in traffic jams), multi-stage turbines at powerplants are 50-60% efficient (but the 60% ones are rare).

I love my Prius, but over my years of driving it my suspicion is that the regen braking contributes VERY little power to the battery, and I try to brake using regen as much as possible. I would guess that most Prius drivers (who drive the car like a normal car, which is even what Toyota says to do) get back a truly trivial amount of energy out of regen braking.

It wouldn't surprise me if full EV regen braking is much more efficient and useful, though.

> most of the savings come from not wasting power while braking

That doesn't check out for me. ICE engines are inefficient because much of the energy from the fuel is converted into heat rather than kinetic energy. Every ICE engine has a radiator whose sole purpose is to vent off waste heat from the engine. ICE engines don't even need a distinct heating element to keep the cabin warm, the waste heat from the engine is more heat than the cabin will ever need.

I don't know that much about how power stations work, but surely it is not this inefficient.

EDIT: Did a bit of reading on gas/coal power plants and it sounds like they are indeed very inefficient: as bad as 20 percent, as good as 60 percent: https://www.energy.gov/fecm/how-gas-turbine-power-plants-wor...

That is mildly horrifying.

Let's consider the numbers... A decent modern combined cycle gas turbine can achieve 60% efficiency, so let's take 50% to be conservative. Transmission losses are generally better than 15%, so that leaves a combined efficiency of 42.5%. A pessimistic charge/discharge efficiency for lithium ion would be 80% and I'd expect the charger to be 90% efficient, which gives us a total (pessimistic) efficiency of 31%.

An internal combustion engine has an optimistic efficiency of about 30%.

So, even if we ignore all the losses in fuel distribution for ICE cars and ignore regenerative effects in electric cars and the ability to incrementally decarbonise the grid, electric still has a slight advantage.

Of course, on the other side, there's never any pollution involved bringing fuel to the gas pump.

You forgot to include the other liter of fuel spent extracting, refining, and shipping the first one. Hence 2x. Also coal has double the emissions of oil per kWh so on an energy basis it's 1/4th